Congress Orders Cost Estimate of Open Access Publishing Requirement from White House

Former OSTP director Alondra Nelson, author of the “Nelson memo” that underpins the current debate over open access policies.
(AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
Congress continues to press the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for a cost estimate of its open access plan for federally funded research.
In August 2022, OSTP’s then acting-director, Alondra Nelson, issued a memo
Concerned about its potential costs, Congress included a provision
The House Appropriations Committee had pushed to prohibit
OSTP has already published two reports looking at how much money the federal government currently spends on open access publishing, responding to previous congressional directives. The first report
In both reports, OSTP said it is challenging to calculate total expenditures on APCs because there is no consistent method for paying them. The costs can be covered by any variety of grants, contracts, or budgets and might be baked into the costs of a grant or require researchers to request reimbursement for publishing fees after the fact. “True APC expenditure records rest with the authors or institutions that pay these fees and the publishers that invoice them,” OSTP stated in the 2023 report.
All federal agencies that fund research are expected to publish open access plans
Though many agencies have already embraced forms of open access publishing, the Nelson memo represents a major shake-up of the publishing industry – one that could prompt a widespread move away from charging readers a subscription to instead asking authors to contribute to publishing costs upfront.
Some lawmakers have raised concerns that moving toward a pay-to-publish model could disadvantage researchers from less-well funded institutions and that the open access requirement could undermine researcher autonomy. The House Appropriations Committee, for example, stated researchers “should have the right to choose how and where they publish or communicate their research and should not be compelled to disseminate their research in ways, or under licenses, that could compromise its integrity or result in modification, manipulations, or monetization without consent.”
OSTP counters, however, that taxpayers should not face barriers to the research they fund. “The American people fund tens of billions of dollars of cutting-edge research annually,” said Alondra Nelson, then acting-head of OSTP in a blog post